What were you doing 20 years ago? A lot of you were probably teaching. Others, I'm sure, were in private industry, with just the smallest seeds of Dilbert-esque angst that would ultimately lead you to leave a lucrative career for one in public education. Some of you may have only recently been born, although readers of this column tend to at least be a little bit older than that. I was wrapping up my freshman year in high school, already thinking about college and leaving what would be a relatively unpleasant four years behind. And ZDNet, like a few of my readers, had just been born.

That's right, ZDNet is turning 20, which, in Internet years, is practically forever. It's gotten all of us ZDNet bloggers thinking about where we were, what we were doing, and just how much things have changed since 1991. That was, after all, the first year I ever had the privilege to use WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS as I helped write my school newspaper. We'd type up stories in WP, print them out on one of the school's 2 laser printers, and then cut and paste the columns onto big sheets of graph paper for printing.

If I had been born in 1991, however, the idea of a "word processor" wouldn't have been quite so novel. Obviously, word processing software had been around for a while by then, but as with most things technical (even today), it took a while to become mainstream in K12 education. If you were students in 1991, how often were you required to type your work? And if you were a teacher, were you accepting that work via email, your SIS, or a social learning tool? Probably not.

Generation Y, or the "Millennials" are defined chronologically in many ways, but are essentially those kids born in 1991, +/- 10 years. I'm from the latter part of Generation X, but experienced the explosion of computer technology (personal, business, enterprise, and Internet) in very different ways from my Millennial successors. We often throw around Prensky's "Digital Native" term: today's Millennials were the first who could actually qualify to be Digital Natives, to take personal and networked computer technology for granted. Many sociologists, in fact, refer to 1991 as the first year of Generation Z, synonymous with the so-called Digital Natives.

Chances are, none of these young people ever checked their email using Pine. The youngest of them may, in fact, never have checked email at all, opting instead for social media and instant messaging. The years since ZDNet opened its virtual doors constitutes an entire lifetime for the average Millennial, meaning that their experience with technology began in the time that ZDNet set out to chronicle and explain.

Much has been made of this generation and the impact that it has only recently begun to have on business, but it's important to remember that a majority of this generation, with sensibilities and assumptions that even those of us in our mid-30's don't necessarily share, is still in high school and college. Their approach to knowledge access and management, collaboration and teaming, and even interpersonal relationships may not mesh well with those of their future teachers and employers. How many of us used Facebook to coordinate and prepare a group project in school? None of us - because it didn't exist yet. I know I have a few teen and 20-something readers, by the way. I don't mean to exclude you. But the vast majority of us simply didn't grow up with the Internet as the social tool that you have. It may have become that for us too, but it certainly didn't start that way.

The pace of technological change in the last 20 years ensures a different sort of generation gap than anyone experienced in the 50's and 60's when the term first became popular. This isn't to say that plenty of 30, 40, 50, and 60 year olds in business and education aren't brilliantly adept with technology. However, when your first experience on a computer is a social one, rather than a utilitarian one, it makes for a very different perspective on what computers should do and be.

Let's look, for example, at the life of a kid born the same year as ZDNet. We can safely assume that it will be at least 1996 before she uses a personal computer. Age 5 is probably a bit of a stretch compared to those born after 2000, but we'll assume that she is part of a well-connected, digitally savvy family. By the turn of the millennium, she is using the Internet daily and is relatively adept at finding information online. Google hasn't even gone public yet, but Yahoo! is booming. So are, for that matter, countless other dot-coms.

September 11th, 2001: The Internet slows to a crawl because it's the first place to which most people, including our 10-year subject, turn for information. The notions of privacy and security change drastically and our 10-year old continues to grow up in a time when privacy is dead, whether by choice (Facebook is just around the corner), for the sake of convenience (Google will go public in a few years), or because the government can use its security trump card (can you say "Patriot Act"?).

The years tick by and PCs get faster; phones get smarter, more mobile, and more ubiquitous (it won't seem completely strange for our now 14-year old to have one of her own); and the Internet becomes the first stop for everything she might want to buy.

And then this whole social thing happens. It had been happening slowly, even with illegally downloaded content that became so easy to share around the turn of the century, but it comes of age with MySpace and Facebook. Twitter evolves into Foursquare and next thing our 20-year old test subject knows, she shares every detail of her life online. The Facebook backlash begins, but she still uses it because everyone else does and who really wants to rebuild all their contacts and "friends" somewhere else? It just isn't worth the effort, no matter how much she hates Farmville. Besides, CityVille really is a great game, isn't it?

And college is great, too, especially since half her classes are online and professors are so happy to post notes, quizzes, slide decks, and everything else she might need on Blackboard. There's this one really old professor who makes her print things out. She's thinking about dropping the class.

The last 20 years have seen the computer transform from a necessary business tool to a window to the Internet. The average 20-year old barely remembers a time when everything he or she needed wasn't at her fingertips (or, more likely, her thumbtips), regardless of what sort of computing device she was using. Chances are, she probably doesn't have the perspective to even wonder just how wild a ride the next 20 years will be.

Christopher Dawson grew up in Seattle, back in the days of pre-antitrust Microsoft, coffeeshops owned by something other than Starbucks, and really loud, inarticulate music. He escaped to the right coast in the early 90's and received a degree in Information Systems from Johns Hopkins University. While there, he began a career in health a...
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Christopher Dawson is the owner and principle consultant for tekedu.net, formerly 6geeks.net, formerly 2D Business Services. Obviously this little company has evolved over the years, first as a side job consulting for local biotechs and ultimately becoming an umbrella for consulting and writing work related to educational technology. He spent 2 years as Vice President of Business Development for WizIQ, Inc., heading up US operations for the Indian company; he still consults for them. He has worked for his local school district as a teacher and technology director, for the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, and for Biogen, Inc. (now Biogen-IDEC, Inc.). He has also consulted with STATNet and Cytyc Corporation and retains close ties with X2 Development Corporation (now part of Follett Software, the supplier of the student information system he administered for several years), including occasional activities that involve some sort of honorarium. However, he promises that if he writes about anything interesting they do, it's because it's interesting and not because they tossed him a few hundred bucks a while back.
He regularly purchases and/or recommends Dell hardware. This is because Dell makes good hardware and has truly committed itself to education in innovative ways, particularly with their "Connected Classroom" initiative. It isn't because he has had dealings with the company through his role at WizIQ (which he has) or because they have provided him with long-term loans of a variety of equipment for in-depth testing (which they have). HP gets nods from him, too; they have similarly provided him with equipment on long-term loan and their workstations rock out loud, so they deserve the coverage.
He actually buys Apple equipment because they don't send him free stuff and he has a nasty Apple habit that he can't help feeding occasionally.
Intel (reference designer for the Classmate PCs he has implemented in his local schools) has provided him with long-term loans of Classmate PCs for testing, as as has Lenovo with its educational offerings. Intel paid all expenses for his attendance at the 2009 Intel Classmate PC Ecosystem Summit which he attended as the sole representative of the technology press. He was invited to attend in 2010 but his wife would have killed him if he spent 3 days in Vegas geeking out and left her home alone with a new baby.
And Google? Well, he has more than one Chromebook provided as preview units and runs his consulting business with Google Apps (in fact, he has 5 different domains tied to Google Apps, one of which he actually pays for to use Google Apps for Business).
Acer provided him with a 50% discount on an Aspire One netbook in early 2009 after he tested it for 30 days through their educational seed program. He liked the netbook at the time but it has since broken and sits unused in his office. Canonical sent him Ubuntu lanyards, t-shirts, and mousepads for his kids. He stole one of the lanyards and proudly hangs his keys from it and occasionally features his 8-year old wearing an oversized Ubuntu t-shirt on his Facebook profile.
Gunnar Optiks sent him a pair of computer glasses to evaluate for a holiday gift guide. He is wearing them now as he types this because they never asked for them back and they rock out loud, too. Seriously - they work brilliantly and make it much easier to spend 20 hours a day staring at an LCD. If they ever asked for them back, he would fork over the $99 and buy a pair.He even convinced his mom to buy him a pair of their sunglasses for his birthday.
Microsoft gave him 2 free copies of Office 2010 professional, a desktop clock, and a useless book on Office 2010 when he attended the launch of Office/Sharepoint 2010. He occasionally uses the SharePoint lanyard they gave him instead of the Ubuntu lanyard for his keys, but feels dirty afterwards.
Blackboard paid him to be a keynote speaker at their 2012 Developers Conference but then went and bought a bunch of open source companies, bumped him from the program so they could explain why they would do such a thing, and he got to keep the cash, all for covering the event for a day. It was bloody hot and humid in New Orleans, so he earned every cent.
Adobe has given him lots of software and more than a couple free lunches at various conferences. Like the Gunnars, he would actually buy a Creative Cloud subscription if his free licenses on CS6/Creative Cloud run out because he couldn't do his job without them and CS6 (yes, I'm going to say it again) rocks out loud. Seriously. $50/month for Creative Cloud is a third of what he'd be willing to pay for it. Which is saying something, because he's actually pretty cheap.
Any other companies wishing to send him cool things to evaluate, wear, or otherwise adorn his kids are more than welcome to; he promises to disclose it here if he keeps any of the stuff.
And speaking of free stuff, Tuf-Luv has sent him enough free stuff to cover just about every tablet, phone, and laptop he's ever owned. That said, when his dog destroyed one of the cases and the Motorola Xoom inside it survived without a slobber mark, he went out and actually bought a new one. Same goes for an iPad he gave away as part of a contest he ran with WizIQ - he (meaning his corporate Amex) actually bought a Tuff-Luv case because (you guessed it) they rock out loud.
He may report on any of these companies as his experiences with them have direct bearing on educational technology, Google, cloud services, etc; positive reports are not necessarily an endorsement and he receives no direct financial compensation from these companies or any others.
He's pretty sure that's it. If he thinks of anything else, he'll be sure to tell you all about it here. By the way, he also writes for lots of other publications, but pretty much just about SMB stuff, so it doesn't really much matter. The writing and broadcasting he does for Edukwest (not surprisingly, ed tech-related) usually gets cross-posted to ZDNet, so that's all good too.